Thursday, October 27, 2016

Russia Suffering Because of Top Elite’ Ever Shorter Time Horizon, Gontmakher Says

Paul
Goble

Staunton, October 27 – A major
obstacle to Russia escaping from its current situation and avoiding the risk of
falling ever further behind the rest of the world is that the country’s most
senior decision makers suffer from an ever shorter term approach to problems
and thus cannot address Russia’s most deep-seated problems, according to
Yevgeny Gontmakher.

The Kremlin elite, the Moscow
economist and commentator says, appears “uninterested in seriously thinking
about the future of their own country” and “in the best case, the time horizon
of strategic planning is the electoral cycle (five to six years)” or three-year
budgets which are so often changed as to be meaningless (echo.msk.ru/blog/gontmaher/1861730-echo/).

And that is true, Gontmakher
continues, despite the government’s proclivity for announcing all kinds of
long-term plans, most of which have no real impact on what Moscow does. What
such plans do allow for is a self-satisfied approach that Russia can proceed
along its own “’special’ path.”

Were the country’s senior leaders
willing to think longer term, they would be compelled to consider more fully
than they have just what that “’special’ path” will lead to. In Gontmakher’s
opinion, they then would quickly discover that Russia doesn’t really have a
realistic option of going its own way unless it is ready to fall ever further
behind the West.

There simply isn’t any other “human
and humanistic alternative to the European way of life.”And that “civilizational train is slowly but
truly moving away from us.” What is more, Gontmakher says, “it is going away
forever, having left Russia outside the world mainstream” and in the company of
places like Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and North Korea.

That is not a prospect anyone who
cares about the future of Russia and Russians can view without horror, he says;
and as aresult, he and those who share his position have joined together in an
expert group, “European Dialogue,” to try to generate discussion about the West
and Russia’s course by bringing together people from both sides to think longer
term.

If the Kremlin elite won’t think
about the longer term, then the expert community has no choice to do so unless
they are prepared for a future that none of them want, Gontmakher concludes.